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Phablet Reviews: Before and After the iPhone 6

Posted by timothy on from the but-that-was-different dept.

Velcroman1 writes Bigger is better. No, wait, bigger is worse. Well, which is it? Apple's newly supersized 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and the jumbo, 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus are a marked departure for the company, which has clung to the same, small screen size for years. It has gone so far as to publicly deride larger phones from competitors, notably Samsung, even as their sales grew to record highs. Tech reviewers over the years have tended to side with Apple, in general saddling reviews of the Samsung Galaxy Note – a 5.3-inch device that kicked off the phablet push in 2012 – with asides about how big the darn thing was. Are tech reviewers being fair when they review the iPhone 6 Plus? Here's what some of them said today, compared with how they reviewed earlier phablets and big phones from the competition.

16 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Very sad by halivar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I hate, hate, hate, hate large phones. If I needed a bigger screen, I'll pull out my tablet or my laptop. I'm a skinny guy, I wear tight-ish jeans (fiance hates it, but I gotta be me), and pulling a big-ass phone out of my front pocket is a pain in my ass, and that's with an IPhone 5S.

    I'm going to pass on the 6 and hope they come out with a traditional-sized one for the 6S or 7.

    1. Re:Very sad by geekoid · · Score: 5, Funny

      Hipster doesn't like new thing. News at 11.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    2. Re:Very sad by Sockatume · · Score: 5, Funny

      Wait, I thought hipsters were the guys who liked the new things? Like if you had an iPad and an iPhone you were a hipster, but if you had an old Android and a Lenovo laptop you were a legitimate human being.

      --
      No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
    3. Re:Very sad by khr · · Score: 4, Funny

      and pulling a big-ass phone out of my front pocket is a pain in my ass.

      If pulling a phone out of your pocket is a pain in your ass, you may be doing something wrong.

    4. Re:Very sad by NeverVotedBush · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I got the iPhone 6 (not the 6 Plus) trading up from a 4S. Still getting used to the 6. For me it is too thin but that's just an opportunity to get a thicker and more protective case.

      But if it wasn't for being able to supersize the icons on the display and Apple Pay, I think I would return it. It's really too big at least until I acclimate - if I acclimate. No way in hell I'd get the 6 Plus unless I got the big gold chain to wear it around my neck and make the display a clock face...

      As phones go, I really liked the size of the 4S better. And so far, I'm not very impressed by the quality of the phone connections. Dropped calls and lots of garbled speech. My 4S had better call quality so far by far. I may still return the 6 if I can't get that figured out as the main reason I have it is to use it as a phone.

  2. what?!?! by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The press is biased towards Apple? You don't say...

    1. Re:what?!?! by oodaloop · · Score: 5, Funny

      I think the reviews are pretty fair. Apple deserves credit for inventing the large phone.

      --
      Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
    2. Re:what?!?! by Sockatume · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Except if you actually go back and read what the press said, there was a little bump of "wow, that's a big phone" for the Galaxy Note and S3 - which were large phones for the time - and then stopped mentioning it. In fact, the general concensus over the past two years is that the iPhones are too small now. If you look up the iPhone 5/S reviews by each of those sites, you'll see the same sorts of remarks. The Nexus 4 really set the benchmark at about 5 inches as far as the press were concerned.

      The premise put forward by the article is, to put it bluntly, unsupported by the facts.

      --
      No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
    3. Re:what?!?! by Charliemopps · · Score: 5, Interesting

      So, what you're saying is... you didn't read the original reviews, the article or even the summary? The quotes are pretty clear.

      On the Galaxy:

      It’s still too big for a smartphone After testing it over the past week and a half, the awkwardness that came with carrying such a large, “notice me” phone outweighed the benefits of it, for me.

      – Lauren Goode

      Same person on the iPhone6:

      Maybe I’m getting old, and my eyes are getting worse. Or maybe I’m stuck in Apple’s reality-distortion field (help). But something strange happened this week. I started to like a phablet.

      – Lauren Goode

      Translation: Your new feature sux because it's not Apple! Oh... Apple did it to? Yay! I like it now!

  3. HEY HEY HEY! by RevWaldo · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's Phat Tablet!

    .

    --
    Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
  4. The traditional response by dontbemad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This seems to be a typical sort of response from a media that tends to bias Apple products. I make no criticism of Apple with that remark, only those responsible for reviewing their products fairly. I get the feeling that a huge number of these reviewers, rather that being classical "tech lovers" if you will, are more prone to have a brand or ecosystem identity that drives their judgement about a given product or product family.

    This kind of trend is fairly common across all major phone manufacturers, across both iOS and Android, and also across Apple and Google themselves. It is why I rarely take a phone review seriously, be it for a phone that I actually am interested in or one that I'm not. Having information about specs and hardware is a good place to start when deciding between two pieces of technology, but past that, a huge amount of one's enjoyment of a device can come from external factors, such as previous brand investment, ecosystem size and saturation, and even things as "trivial" as what one's friends are using.

    I try not to be terribly upset when I see Apple product reviewers exhibiting these signs of bias, since a large number of Android (and perhaps even some windows phone?) reviewers do the same things. I read and watch these reviews as I would watch news about politics: with a boulder sized grain of salt. While some truth may be found somewhere in the reviewer's statements, they still can and do fall prey to human shortcomings that affects us all.

  5. I'm pleasantly surprised. by geekoid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm pleasantly surprised by the number of people in the article that basically said the same thing in both reviews. I couple of people magically changed their tunes with the Apple 6, but not as many as I thought.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  6. Meh, anything Apple does is considered "cool". by the_humeister · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Before switching to x86: x86 sucks ass! PowerPC all the way!

    After switching to x86: x86 is awesome! Glad we don't have PowerPC anymore!

    1. Re:Meh, anything Apple does is considered "cool". by jpellino · · Score: 4, Informative

      Well, it was a bit more complicated than that. At the outset PPC did outperform x86. Good reason to use it. x86 caught up and PPC development was clearly not going to be able to support notebook computing (which is why you never had a iBook G5). At that point it was a good business decision to switch. Apple even made it amazingly simple to migrate apps from PPC to x86 as long as you took their giant repeated hints to use xCode - something that Adobe just didn't pay attention to. Their nonsense was probably the biggest user-facing bump in the switchover.

      --
      "Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
  7. Re:Talk about an unsupported hypothesis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
    No, they actually say they started liking phablets the moment Apple did one, it is not their experience with other phablets. The most clear quote (actually admitting it) is from Lauren Goode who said about the Note:

    It’s still too big for a smartphone After testing it over the past week and a half, the awkwardness that came with carrying such a large, “notice me” phone outweighed the benefits of it, for me.

    And then about the iPhone 6 plus:

    Maybe I’m getting old, and my eyes are getting worse. Or maybe I’m stuck in Apple’s reality-distortion field (help). But something strange happened this week. I started to like a phablet.

    And they feel comfortable making damning statements about a non Apple device, while saying the same thing as politely as possible for the iPhone. E.g. compare a TechCrunch quote on the Note:

    I found that it was really difficult to get comfortable with the device, never feeling like I had complete control over it as I would with a smaller phone.

    With that on the iPhone:

    the additional size makes for a less ‘perfect’ ergonomic quality, something the iPhone 6 definitely achieves

    The worst they can say about the iPhone 6 plus is "less perfect", while adding that the iPhone 6 IS perfect. Until one month ago, of course, the iPhone 5/5S was the ergonomically perfect one, while Samsung Galaxy S3/4/5 where awkwardly large. I guess perfection just follows Apple wherever they go. "Journalists" just follow right behind.

  8. Re:Different things for different people by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's news to Apple